Ways to reduce bounce rates

A high bounce rate leads to lower conversion rates and it negatively affects your website’s SEO rankings. These two combined may cost your business a lot in the long run.

What is bounce rate?

According to Google, the bounce rate is the percentage of website visits that end after visiting the landing page. For example, a visitor lands on your website and leaves it without visiting any other pages factors towards a higher bounce rate.

Having a high bounce rate indicates that your landing page lacks relevance or engagement, however, there are a few simple changes you could make to your website in order to improve this.

It’s difficult to determine when bounce rates are bad (high) or good (low), as it really depends on the website’s industry. However, bounce rates over 70% can be generally considered high.

With that said, if your website falls under this percentage, here are a few useful tips on how to fix this.

Tips to lower your bounce rate

1. Optimise your website’s load speed

A slow loading page is one of the main reasons why people leave websites, as 40% of visitors will leave your website if the page does not load in 3-5 seconds.

This is why website speed optimisation should be done before any other optimisation steps are made.

Tip: For WordPress websites, you can easily install almost any popular cache plugin, in order to help optimise this without any major technical abilities.

2. Optimise your website’s content

Content optimisation involves keyword research, effective use of relevant keywords and the ability to understand the searcher’s intent.

Keyword research helps you understand what your target audience is looking for and the exact terms they type in search engines when searching for products or services similar to yours.

Once you have identified the relevant keywords, the next step is placing these keywords effectively in your title tag, heading tags, call to action buttons and the rest of your page’s content accordingly — without coming across spammy.

3. Mobile optimisation

A 2019 study states that up to 70% of web traffic happens on a mobile device, so a mobile-optimised website is a must.

If you do not optimise your website for a small screen, people may get frustrated and leave it in a matter of seconds.

Missing this crowd can seriously harm your sales, especially because the number of mobile visits is likely to go even higher than 70% in the future.

4. Create an engaging call to action (CTA)

CTAs should be one of the first things your visitors should notice on your website, as well-distributed and eye-catching CTAs can help improve the user flow on your website — whilst also resulting in lowering your bounce rate.

It’s very important to make them effective, prompting your visitors to take action, whilst it’s also very important not to overwhelm your visitors by including too many CTAs.

Instead, you should try to out what exactly you’d like your visitors to do next and placing your call to actions accordingly.

Multiple CTAs on the same page

If you’re wanting to offer multiple products or services on the same page, adding more calls to action is acceptable — as long as they don’t distract the visitors too much.

A good example to aim towards would be the Abbey Masterbatch website. It uses 3 relevant CTAs above the fold, focusing on separate services that they offer, whilst not overwhelming the visitor with too many CTAs too.

Tell users where they’re going

For SEO purposes, Google tells us that having generic links which read similar to ‘Click here’ for example, isn’t a good practice, as they don’t easily provide search engines indication on what the page may contain, therefore, reducing the relevance of the link. Instead; you should try to be more descriptive and tell your visitors what exactly they’re clicking on.

You should follow this same practice for your CTAs, as people are more likely to click on something if they know where they’re going first, as the link ultimately may provide more relevance to them.

5. Intuitive navigation and website layout

Intuitive navigations and website layouts help improve your website’s user experience by allowing the most important website elements to stand out.

The hierarchy of website elements is of utmost importance here and when you figure out which elements and what information you’d like your visitors to see first, you should adjust your website accordingly.

You should go evaluate your current website navigation and see if it can be further simplified. It is important to offer your visitors a seamless flow through your website and enable them to get from one page of your website to another — helping to reduce your website’s bounce rate.

Consider A/B testing for lowering PPC bounce rates

A/B testing is a method used by PPC marketers, which involves having multiple landing pages for the same conversion goal. These pages either have different content, slightly adjusted layouts or sometimes even both.

Usually, these pages are designed to compete against each other, allowing the internal PPC marketers to determine which landing page is the most effective for conversions, therefore, resulting in the best return on investment.